magnetizer

In order to do this, he had to pierce the spiritual fog surrounding somnambulism, a fog that was traceable, in large part, to the practices of Franz Anton Mesmer and the ‘animal magnetizers’ of Europe.

‘The Scherzo’, says M. Berlioz, ‘is an extraordinary composition’; the very opening, though containing nothing terrible in itself, produces the same inexplicable emotion that is caused by the gaze of a magnetiser [i.e. mesmerist].